Introduction

This OWASP cheat sheet for Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) is intended for an executive audience and for application security program assessors. It contains a list of application security program weaknesses that is intended to be built out over time, similar to MITRE's Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) for software weaknesses. This list of program weaknesses is called the Common Program Weakness Enumeration (CPWE). The CPWE spans topics having to do with both institutionalization of an application security program, and also systems development touch points. An example of a CPWE use case is an organization having a SAMM or BSIMM assessment done, and the findings are mapped to CPWE-ID. Mappings are done in a similar fashion as one can for example generally configure software vulnerability assessment tools to map software weakness findings to CWE (or e.g. OWASP Top Ten), so that one can compare apples to apples regardless of program assessment methodology. I.e., regardless if for example SAMM or BSIMM was used. Long-term goals for leveraging the CPWE potentially include creating an OWASP CISO Top Ten project using the CPWE as inputs (i.e. that draws from the list), as a sort of brass ring for an OWASP CISO "guide".